A while ago I read this article on TechCrunch Marissa Mayer’s Next Big Thing: “Contextual Discovery” — Google Results Without Search and it inspired me. It helped me discover a recurring theme in my thoughts (and on this blog) that search is useful for known unknowns. The flipside of that is unknown unknowns, something you didn’t know you didn’t know. In the above article Mayer talks about pushing information to people. She talks alot about location but it doesn’t need to be restricted to that.
Currently on TRIP we have the ability for people to record their clinical area of interest and/or specific keywords of interest. The specific keywords works reasonably well. You say you’re interested in stable angina, and we email you every article that is about stable angina – simple and the feedback is positive. Move to the wider clinical areas of interest (e.g. cardiology) and things get more problematic as it’s so broad.
But what if you’re like one of the people who doesn’t register or if they do they don’t record any interests? Fine you use TRIP, it works well and that’s arguably enough.
But I want TRIP to do more.
If we encourage people to login we can start to note the articles they click on and start to create clinical hot spots of interest. When they next login to TRIP (or we email them) we show them new articles that match there previous interests. They don’t need to search. There are a few issues (e.g. does previous searching predict future interests?) but I feel this is an avenue worth pursing. I’m actually confident we can create these clinical hotspots and use that to the benefit of our users.
But what do you think? Please comment to let me know.
Trip Database Blog 
February 3, 2011 at 11:46 am
My gut feeling is that this will not work for those of us in primary care. I really don't want to be pushed stuff. When I'm using Trip in the surgery I want to get in there and get out as quickly as possible. My most common use of Trip is as a metasearch of clinical guidelines so I don't have to go round the houses seeing who has done what.
Yes, I don't know what I don't know, but sending me links to quite long papers/documents when I am trying to do something else is not going to facilitate me in getting over that hurdle!
I suppose if the links were coming from other GP searches who had graduated between 1990 and 2000, then there may be some use. I would still use Trip if I had to log-in. I have to log-in every time I use CWS (Clinical Workstation- our connection to the hospital's network) but it doesn't stop me. So I think go for logging in. I'll rarely want to go back over content, I think, but it could be useful in many different ways that are yet to emerge. But don't hassle me!
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February 3, 2011 at 11:46 am
My gut feeling is that this will not work for those of us in primary care. I really don't want to be pushed stuff. When I'm using Trip in the surgery I want to get in there and get out as quickly as possible. My most common use of Trip is as a metasearch of clinical guidelines so I don't have to go round the houses seeing who has done what.
Yes, I don't know what I don't know, but sending me links to quite long papers/documents when I am trying to do something else is not going to facilitate me in getting over that hurdle!
I suppose if the links were coming from other GP searches who had graduated between 1990 and 2000, then there may be some use. I would still use Trip if I had to log-in. I have to log-in every time I use CWS (Clinical Workstation- our connection to the hospital's network) but it doesn't stop me. So I think go for logging in. I'll rarely want to go back over content, I think, but it could be useful in many different ways that are yet to emerge. But don't hassle me!
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